When I first met Peter Bregman, he was on his book tour speaking at Microsoft Research. In 2012. He tried to convince me to give up Outlook Tasks for managing all the stuff that I wasn’t doing. His logic was sound. He repeatedly pointed out that “It’s...

A friend of mine just sent me a link and asked my opinion. Always a dangerous thing to do… Here you go, Chris! I appreciate that she’s writing about MSFT and promoting what our execs are saying (have been saying for years =), but I think that Emily’s...

I’m not sure what to make of this, but it was amusing (to me): I was curious about why my PC suddenly started skipping tunes in Zune (yeah, I know) and losing keystrokes in InDesign. Apparently it was because OneDrive was re-uploading the entire contents...

On the off chance that I’ll forget or someone else might wonder how to get these two great services to work together, here’s the scoop. If you have small children (or older children who are grounded but still need to do homework and collaborative writing...

Everybody loves free stuff, right? Get your free ebooks! http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ebooks You’ll have to register, of course, and you’ll have to have an ereader of some sort that can display PDF, EPUB, and/or Mobi...

Some people (who are not me) have a way with words that fit into 140 characters. Witness Aaron Levie (who’s not usually a big fan of Microsoft): What on earth was he talking about? My favorite new data toys! Power BI for Office 365 . Whether you’ve got...

I’ve needed a personal assistant for a long time, but I don’t rate one here at Microsoft. (I married powerful woman with her own agenda and a workload *at least* triple my own who needs her own personal assistant, so I won’t get any sympathy there.) Enter...

One of my favorite comedians passed yesterday . John Pinette was one the few contemporary comedians that we could listen to with the kids when they were small on our 3,000-mile journeys across the fruited plain. His jokes are frequently retold at Fort...

I don’t hate April Fools’ Day on principle. (Yes, I do.) I just hate it because you can never tell whether the unexpected is a prank, or something more serious. Also, some people don’t seem to know where the line is between prank and something more serious...

Mike’s got some great points about how agile goes wrong. I’ve seen them all. The skills and talents of individual programmers are the main determinant of software quality. No amount of management, methodology, or high-level architecture astronautism can...

Apparently, the Ed Bott does, too. Summary: In Silicon Valley (and in media satellites that take the NoCal mindset to New York and beyond), everyone has an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a Gmail account. Microsoft products and services might as well be from...

In the ongoing saga of my life starring in Scott Adam’s imagination… I’ve had this annual review once upon a time, about three years ago. Not fun. I’ve since been MUCH more careful about choosing my managers. Choosing the right job? Important. Choosing...

Full disclosure: I come from a long line of hillbillies. I know whereof I speak when I talk about family feuds. The Hatfields and the McCoys were pikers when it comes to vendettas. That said, Scott’s got an amusing blog about an interaction he had with...

I’m one of those folks who prefers to test the depth of a river with both feet, and this learning mode from CodeAcademy appeals to me. Codecademy does a pretty good job, but one group of programmers wanted to make it a little more accessible. Enter CodeCombat...

This. Is. True. “People make the incorrect assumption that software engineering is writing code to a spec, but it’s not. The engineering decisions you make also matter a lot — and no one builds engineering organizations with this in mind.” Why Yammer...

Wow. In Finland, organizations seeking to carry out donation drives (charities etc.) must seek permission from Finnish police. The measure is intended to make it more difficult to carry out fraudulent donation drives in the country. Since Wikipedia's...

I've been dark for a bit, traveling to Budapest and Seattle, but... I've been thinking a lot about our CEO search.
Mostly because that's what everyone asks about second when they find out that I work for Microsoft.
The first question is always WHY...

I’ve long been a big fan of agile development and DevOps, but after lots of recent projects and non-trivial pain points, I’m skeptical of anyone who recommends “less documentation” as leading to improvements in processes and quality. These techniques...

I’ve been teaching one of my customers the fundamentals of Power BI this past week, so maybe I’m just hypersensitized to data issues right now, but I saw this and thought it was humorous. If your data isn’t clean, you’ll get really “interesting” results...

As we get to EOL for Windows XP, the transition to modern browsers should be well underway… Google Apps users will have to upgrade to either Internet Explorer 10 or 11 as Google moves away from supporting users on the older IE9. Google Apps Soon Ending...

There was a story last year about how Target predicted that a teenage girl was pregnant, based on her shopping habits, before her parents became aware of the situation. Target broke through to a new level of customer tracking with the help of statistical...

You know how the most innocuous thing can become a technological mountain… under time pressure? The fact that I seem to still have unreasonable expectations about similarities between Windows 8.1 [Codename Blue] and Windows RT 8.1 [Codename Blue] turned...

I’m putting together (for my own edification) a list of tooling that folks developing for phones and tablets thinks are “must have” on the major platforms for line of business (LOB) applications. If you are doing LOB mobile development for Windows Phone...

Maybe it’s midlife. Maybe it’s too much free time. Maybe it’s just a side effect for designing the next generation platform for something... Whatever the root cause, I’ve been pondering lately what’s going to be the next Legacy Technology™. I think Hal...